As there are more home Wireless Fidelity (English: Wireless Fidelity, WiFi for short) devices, an increasingly large quantity of families implement network coverage in different rooms or on different floors by using multiple routers. For a networking manner among multiple routers in a home, a manner shown in FIG. 1 is provided in the prior art.
In FIG. 1, a router 1 is a top-level router of a home network and is connected to the Internet. The router 1 corresponds to a network segment 192.168.1.1 and a service set identifier (English: Service Set Identifier, for short: SSID) 1. A router 2 is cascaded with the router 1. The router 2 corresponds to a network segment 192.168.2.1 and an SSID 2. A router 3 is also cascaded with the router 1 and is disposed in parallel with the router 2. The router 3 corresponds to a network segment 192.168.3.1 and an SSID 3.
In a networking manner shown in FIG. 1, a WiFi device needs to use different SSIDs to connect to different routers, and Internet Protocol (English: Internet Protocol, IP for short) addresses of different network segments are assigned to the WiFi device. For example, a mobile phone needs to use the SSID 1 to connect to the router 1, and an IP address assigned to the mobile phone 1 is, for example, 192.168.1.2. A mobile phone 2 needs to use the SSID 2 to connect to the router 2, and an IP address assigned to the mobile phone 2 is 192.168.2.2. A mobile phone 3 needs to use the SSID 3 to connect to the router 3, and an IP address assigned to the mobile phone 3 is 192.168.3.2. Therefore, the mobile phone 1, the mobile phone and the mobile phone 3 are located in different sub-local area networks, and the mobile phone 1, the mobile phone 2, and the mobile phone 3 cannot be interconnected and communicate with each other.
It may be learned from above that in the cascade networking manner shown in FIG. 1, user equipments that are connected to different gateway devices cannot communicate with each other.